The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Blood and Water" (South Pacific Pictures, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I switched to PBS and watched the opening episode of a good if quirky policier from New Zealand, The Brokenwood Mysteries. It’s about the murder of a drunken boor named Nate Dunn (Chris Sherwood), who 10 years earlier was widely believed to have killed his wife Evelyn (Sophie Henderson) in a hit-and-run “accident.” He’s thrown off a local bridge in an attempt to make it look like suicide, but the police investigating the case, out-of-town detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) and his local partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), deduce that he was murdered. Among the principal suspects are Nate’s son Dwayne (Marc Pritchard, a ruggedly handsome young man and easily the sexiest guy in the cast), who was with his girlfriend Sally (Shoshana McCullum) the night his dad was killed; local organic farmer Phillip Henderson (Mike Edward), who complained that it was hard for him to keep his organic certification because the pesticides Nate was using on his fields blew over into Henderson’s; and retired police detective Gary McLeod (Mark Clare), who settled in Brokenwood and is still obsessed with Evelyn’s case after he failed to solve it a decade earlier. Nate Dunn acquired a reputation for physically abusing his wife Evelyn, but it turned out he was covering for his son Dwayne, who regularly beat up his mom – something we learn when Dwayne’s girlfriend Sally shows up with a black eye from a punch from Dwayne. Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Evelyn’s sister, Meredith Wilmott (Andi Crown), who killed Evelyn by mistake a decade earlier – she deliberately ran her down thinking she was Nate because at the time Evelyn was wearing Nate’s oil-skin jacket – and killed Nate more recently to cover up her original crime and because she, like everybody else in town, thought Nate was abusing Evelyn. It ends with a bizarre sequence in which Mike and Kristin are able to chase down Meredith and arrest her even though they're only in a car while Meredith is trying to make her getaway in a private plane.

Mike Shepherd is drawn as a typically eccentric British (or British Commonwealth) mystery cop, with a penchant for listening to American country music (his favorite is Patsy Cline) and inflicting it on everyone who goes for a ride with him in his well-preserved 1971 Holden Kingswood. He plays the country records on cassette, which startles Kristin Sims. He also treats Sims in a decidedly sexist fashion, having her sort through boxes of Nate’s papers looking for a clue as to who murdered him while he does the fun work of actually doing field interviews with people. Mike has three or four ex-wives – even he’s lost count of just how many times he’s been married – and one of his exes is his supervisor on the police force while another one, Tania Stokes (Miriama McDowell), is dating Phillip Henderson and was his alibi witness. In the end Mike accepts an appointment to head the homicide department in Brokenwood – replacing McLeod, who has terminal cancer and goes into a coma just before the show ends, with his death clearly imminent (though McLeod is at one point the prime suspect and he luckily comes to just long enough to learn he’s been cleared) – even though this means a demotion and corresponding cut in pay. Judging from this first episode, The Brokenwood Mysteries is a pretty typical British (or British Commonwealth) crime show, with quirky detectives who are often more interesting than the crooks they go after, though it suffers from the thick New Zealand accents of the cast members. It was often hard for me to understand the dialogue, especially when the actors insisted on pronouncing the word “detective” as “duh-TEEK-tive.”